


Wick

by Orichalxos



Category: Secret Garden - Burnett
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-20
Updated: 2009-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-04 17:47:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,791
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/32790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Orichalxos/pseuds/Orichalxos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dickon's first year after he comes home from the war.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wick

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sandpipersummer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sandpipersummer/gifts).



In June they send Dickon home from the war. Martha meets him on the platform at Thwaite with a broad grin and only the slightest flinch at his empty sleeve. She brings him back to the farmhouse, filled now with her own brood from littlest Kate to next-eldest Ned. They've all followed his few letters, along with many more from their Da and from Johnny, the eldest, and the storm of questions around him is like a rushing brook.

They ask about what he did, who he fought, did he talk to Da, did he ever see a Frenchy? Dickon answers a little as he eats. The boys steal his hat and play soldier, the girls say "Parlay-voo" and giggle.  And finally wee Kate, who's been watching him with a toddler's disapproving stare, asks after his arm.

"It's all gone," she declares, pointing to his left side and the pinned-up sleeve dangling from his shoulder.  "Did tha' lose it?" Martha gives a worried glance over her shoulder, but Dickon answers, slowly and haltingly.

"Aye, Katie, that I did. A long way away, ever so far." The hush in the conversation passes, and he sighs with relief.

Under the current of sound from Martha and the children, mixing with the birds outside, there is a deeper sound. Dickon listens in the house for the absences of five brothers, two more brothers-in-law. Martha's Jock will be coming home, and hopefully Johnny too, but the rest have all been lost to the war. He rattles in the house like a dried pea in a barrel, even on rainy days when the whole lot of them squeeze inside. It's as if he lives somewhere else entirely, somewhere with nobody but himself and the holes in his family.

The war has passed through the Sowerbys like a scythe through dry grass.

***

In August Martha sends him to Misselthwaite for the first time. The errand isn’t important, and he hears the real reason in her voice as she waves him goodbye. "Tha’ ought t’ see th’ garden, see how it's done since tha’s been gone." 

He passes through the orchard, under the shrubbery gate and into the main gardens. But the path seems to escape his feet, and he finds himself circling the stone fountain and stumbling between kitchen gardens and bedding-out plants, searching for the long path around the ivied walls.

Finally he stands before the closed door of the secret garden, still partly hidden under ivy. Dickon remembers how Master Colin insisted that a bit of the mystery remain. "The ones that need the Magic will find it," he said. "The Magic will lead them there."  The roses have grown so far they spill out over the walls like a torrent of red.

Once, this place had healed Colin from the shadows within his mind; once, Dickon and Mary had worked a miracle, drawing life out of the earth and conjuring roses from what had seemed dead. He yearns for the robin's song of eggs and fledglings, of sun and life and light.

Dickon lays his hand against the door and listens.  The roughness in his lungs from a brush with mustard gas mutters a different song, bitter and angry. He remembers poppies blowing in the fields over the corpses of his comrades, and the torrent of roses seems crude all of a sudden—like laughter at a funeral.  He dares not open the door for fear he'll hear the same song of cold mud and slow deaths, barbed wire and incendiaries, underlying the richness of the secret garden.

He reaches out with the arm that isn't there anymore, trying to be slow and careful as he used to do, but the robin startles at the twitch of his shoulder and flies off to the trees inside the garden.  Dickon frowns at his own clumsiness and retreats from the closed door.

***

In October Dickon receives a letter from Mistress Mary, inviting him to take up a position as gardener for the manor. At first he thinks it's just charity—Mary's war relief work has fed a lot of people in Thwaite—but in his heart he knows that this is friendship, even if there is also charity in it.

He moves into Ben Weatherstaff's old cottage, replacing the memory of one batchelder with a newer one. Living on his own is difficult, and simple tasks take him longer to complete. But the silence of the cottage is kinder than the twin notes of bustle and loss at the Sowerby house.

Dickon's work in the gardens is slow but exacting, as he clips away the dead growth and clears the beds for the coming winter. He struggles to remember the joy he had in doing the same work in the secret garden; more often, he thinks of digging trenches, handling dead twigs and barren ground. He no longer gets lost in the paths as he did that day in August, but he doesn't hear the song of the robin either.

He sees Mary walking through the gardens, pausing as he did before the closed ivy-covered door, and sometimes walks with her in silence for a ways. 

***

In November the armistice is declared. Dickon goes to the churchyard to look in on Ben.

Ben passed away two years before the war began. A good way to go, thinks Dickon, remembering the day he'd found Ben under one of the elms. Just passed in his sleep, smiling under the warmth of the sun and looking as peaceful as could be. Dickon hadn't cried then, though he'd missed him in the years to come.

When Ben had passed, it had been natural as the setting of the sun. Standing at the foot of Ben's grave, Dickon thinks of the other deaths he's seen since then. The rain is unrelenting and chill, and the mud under his feet brings the trenches to mind. The moors are whispering of the winter's sleep, the need to lay down and return to the earth.

***

In January the bitter cold weather seeps into his dreams, and he is shivering at Ypres once again. He's returned there in his dreams over and over, spending his nights in endless repetition of the cold, the mud, the cries, the fear and suspense. The earth thrums with far-off machine gun fire and shudders from the explosions of shells.

This time, halfway through, Dickon stops and listens. At the edge of his memory, the outside of his dreams, is someone whistling. _Pour le repos, la plaisir de militaire…Madelon, Madelon, Madelon…_

Jean had whistled that on the sunny days of winter, when they'd been trapped in a trench for ten days together. When Jean had switched to singing quietly, his breath had come in icy puffs. The sun had kept the mud from frosting over, but the moisture in the mud had leeched the warmth out of them and they'd lain close together, warming each other with their breath.

Jean had begged him to tell about summer in Yorkshire. Little by little, Dickon told him of finding Captain and of tending to Soot's wing. He'd watched Jean's eyes light up when he spoke of the moors, the gorse and the heather blooming in the sun, and the butterflies swarming in the summer breeze.

"Ahh, Dickon," Jean had said. "how I wish you could have seen this land in spring, real spring! The apple orchard alone would make you think you'd gone to heaven…" And Jean had tipped his head back to the sky and smiled a smile that caught all the sun in the world.

Dickon wakes with Jean's voice still in his ears and the wind wuthering outside like a poor lost thing. He listens harder, but under the howl of the wind the murmur of the earth speaks of calm and rest, not freezing and death. And the echoes of "Madelon" linger in his heart.

Something in him is still green, even under all the loss, the rough lungs, the trembling hands, the absences of the dead, the robbed nests and the frozen lambs. Something in him still struggles to grow toward the sun that had shone in Jean's smile.

***

In March Dickon stands before the door of the secret garden once more. The robin cheeps at him from the wall and disappears within. Dickon starts to whistle a robin's song, and finds it changing into Madelon.

He listens. The murmur of the earth is deep and bell-like, and his heart resonates in tune.  Taking a deep breath, he slowly opens the door. As it creaks open slowly, the trailing ivy cascades over his shoulders as he steps inside.

The garden is almost as he first saw it—still and secret, if not the tangle it was then. The green is just beginning to show on branches only now recovering from the harsh winter. The robin hops down to a rosebush near him, balancing on a thick stem showing the first evidence of leaves.

He comes around a bend and finds Mary standing at the foot of the great oak tree. He follows her gaze up to the large scar on its side, where the branch had fallen many years before and almost destroyed Mister Craven’s life. Ivy leaves twine around the scar without hiding it entirely.

Dickon reaches over to touch his own scar and his empty sleeve. "The oak an' me," he says to her "we're more alike than once was."

She looks around the garden. "It's growing again, just as it was then—but so much has changed. You…the village…and when Colin comes home, he'll be changed as well."

Dickon kneels by one of the flowerbeds and begins clearing dead leaves away from the green tips of crocuses. The smell of thawing earth fills his nose, and he finds himself smiling at the tiny new plants.

"Even when the ones we love are gone or changed, the world is still wick," Mary says. "The roses will still grow this summer, without them."

"It's Magic still, though harder than any before," says Dickon. The truth of it comes slowly, a new discovery, though part of him may have always known it. "It goes on an’ blooms, bright an’ graidely, an’ we live on without them. All the world’s callin’ still."

Mary nods, and closes her eyes.

Dickon listens, and hears the echo of Jean's singing, the gentle snoring of Ben under a tree, the cadences of Colin's lectures on Magic, waiting underneath the growing call of springtime. The seed struggling to grow against the cold earth, the stump sending out volunteer runners, the courage to bloom and live. The earth hums with the hardest Magic of all, the Magic of returning to life. 


End file.
